Jim Shaw

Dream Object Book

Description

Numbered copy

Since the 1990s, Jim Shaw had been working on a project to record and render his dreams, making many of the artworks he had encountered in his sleep. Eventually, in 2007, the artist had a dream of an artwork that would be a Plexiglass box wherein all the Dream Objects would congregate to be represented in miniature. Atop the pile of objects was a mini sculpture of the Great Whore of Babylon in flamboyant red. Jim Shaw set out to sculpt the miniatures and print out small versions of the two-dimensional works in order to melt them together in the box, allowing the viewer to discover through the transparent plexiglass the substrate formed by the objects. Since an immense amount of labor would be rendered invisible, the artist decided to document the contents and curated a miniature exhibition in a scale model museum. The Dream Object Book is the sole proof of the exhibition that was imagined and lost. The Dream Object Book is the book and catalogue raisonné of this exhibition, uniting fantasy and reality.